A blog sharing information about materials presented to children on climate, highlighting those intended to frighten or mislead, and those which seek to inform and inspire rather than to recruit, even the very young, for an ill-founded political campaign around the threat of CAGW. A campaign which is irresponsible, destructive, divisive, and degrading.

'First, the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide are dominant over the climatic effects and are overwhelmingly beneficial. Second, the climatic effects observed in the real world are much less damaging than the effects predicted by the climate models, and have also been frequently beneficial.'

Sunday, 22 January 2012

Climate Credulity of Operatic Proportions: a misled schoolgirl and a monument to madness at Glyndebourne

A large turbine has been erected on a site 80m above sea level, owned by and overlooking the famous Opera House at Glyndebourne. The location is on the South Downs, a particularly beautiful part of south-east England. Naturally, the erection of such a burden on electricity consumers, and a noisy, dangerous disruption to a once-precious skyline to boot, was preceded by a lot of opposition in planning, but the primary beneficiaries of the subsidies, Northern Energy and presumably the opera house, have welcomed it. The Guardian newspaper gave the official opening very generous coverage (indeed only a Labour government minister intervening gave it the go-ahead against local wishes). Hat-tip for the Guardian link and some discussion of it at Bishop Hill.

A senior pupil from a nearby school is reported as making this disturbing remark:

‘I don't get how anyone can object to it. In a few years' time they won't even notice it. In another few years, if we don't do something about climate change, this view won't be here anyway because we'll all be under water.’

The location of the turbine is on a hillside at about 80m above sea level, in the midst of the South Downs which go up to 270m above sea level. The nearby village of Glynde is at about 25m above sea level, and near to a low river valley only 5 to 10m above sea level (the location is close to the south coast, near Lewes).

Even the discredited and despicably alarmist IPCC only projects global sea level rises in the range of 0.2 to 0.6m by the year 2100. Recent trends is the slow and steady sea level rise of the past 150 years suggest that even the lower end of this range may be of the high side for some locations at least. The sinking of the SE corner of England into the sea at around 0.5 to 1mm per year might add as much as another 0.1m to the sea level rise there, but we are still dramatically short of threatening Glyndebourne. An expert in coastal erosion in England, E.M. Lee, has noted much exaggeration in projections based on IPCC reports:

‘."perhaps we were all too keen to accept the unquestioned authority of the IPCC and their projections." Thus, he ends by stating "I am left with the feeling that a healthy skepticism of the climate change industry might not be such a bad thing," ‘

Oh that the teachers of this deluded schoolgirl had had such insight! There is not the slightest prospect of the sea reaching Glyndebourne 'in another few years', and arguably not even in whatever may be left of the Holocene if we are close to the end of it.

Who taught what and when to this schoolgirl? Perhaps she is exceptionally credulous and vulnerable to scare stories. That does not forgive those who have misled her, but it does give hope that not all her classmates are in the same sorry state as she is with regard to climate change and sea-levels.

A propaganda puff for the turbine by Northern Energy and the local council may deserve part of the blame. It confidently declares that:

‘There is now compelling evidence that human activity is changing the world’s climate. Temperatures are rising and so are sea levels. Extreme weather is becoming more common.’

All four of these assertions are misleading to the uninformed reader to the point of severe deception. First, two platitudes: climate changes all the time, human activity must affect it. All things in and around the climate system affect it. It is immensely complex, and driven by powerful forces that make any plausible human effect look derisory in comparison. In recent decades, the system has been acting pretty much as if the additional CO2 was having no effect at all. For rebuttals of all four assertions in this short sentence by Northern Energy, let me just direct the interested reader to the C3 web site. Scroll down to find dozens of papers, mostly peer-reviewed studies in the scientific literature, that undermine each of the scaremongering claims being exploited by Northern Energy.

Meanwhile, from California, another playground for those driven to distraction by eco-scares, here’s some sea level history there for the past 70 years( Real Climate & Data source)

Scary, eh?

Not the sea levels - they'e acting just as if the rising CO2 does not matter - but the alarmism.

It is scary that so many can be fooled so easily and so deliberately by so few based on so little.

Gilbert & Sullivan would have had a field day with this sorry fiasco at Glyndebourne.

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Observed and Expected Temperatures

Scafetta Model
This displays a forecast made by Scafetta using a simple model combining various cycles which have been observed in temperatures, together with some 'adjustment for global warming'. His forecast has the light blue background. An IPCC 2007 'projection' is shown with a green background. The bold red-then-blue line is the HadCRUT calculation of a global mean temperature, with blue line connecting the most recent results. (Source: Tallbloke's blog). A 2016 paper by Scafetta: http://www.iieta.org/sites/default/files/Journals/HTECH/IJHT.34.S2_35.pdf